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Debugging Tip: Trace the Process and See What It is Doing with strace

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: April 15, 2008]

strace is a useful diagnostic, instructional, and debugging tool. It can save lots of headache. System administrators, diagnosticians and trouble-shooters will find it invaluable for solving problems with programs for which the source is not readily available since they do not need to be recompiled in order to trace them. This is also useful to submit bug reports to open source developers.

Each line in the trace contains the system call name, followed by its arguments in parentheses and its return value.

Run strace against /bin/foo and capture its output to a text file in output.txt:
$ strace -o output.txt /bin/foo
You can strace the webserver process and see what it's doing. For example, strace php5 fastcgi process, enter:
$ strace -p 22254 -s 80 -o /tmp/debug.lighttpd.txt
To see only a trace of the open, read system calls, enter :
$ strace -e trace=open,read -p 22254 -s 80 -o debug.webserver.txt
Where,

Refer to strace man page for more information:
$ man strace

Continue reading rest of the How to report / Find a bug under Linux series.

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